For instance:
senci has only one argument, so it's an intransitive predicate with a subject.
sumne has two arguments, one of which is defined as "experiencer" and as the x1, but it's not unambiguously the agent (the participant in a situation
that carries out the action in this situation) so long as the x2 can be considered as the primary cause of the experience of smelling but yet not unambiguously as the agent either from a common viewpoint. According to Wikipedia, the linguist David Dowty suggests (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_%28grammar%29) that, in
His energy surprised everyone.
,
His energy is the agent, "even though it does not have most of the typical agent-like qualities
such as perception, movement, or volition". From that viewpoint, it would be reasonable to say
sumne's x2 is the agent. In fact, the gimste offers varying definitions in terms of the arguments' roles:
a.
x1 smells/scents x2 b.
x2 smells/has odor/scent to observer x1And the interpretation of cases starts to appear even more undecided/speaker-dependent when we take into account the following situation.
If native English speakers see
da sumne de, they would probably generally take the definition (a) and consider the x1 nominative:
[NOMINATIVE] [verb] [ACCUSATIVE]The same for native Japanese speakers, despite their different word order:
[NOMINATIVE] [ACCUSATIVE] [verb]But what if native Basque speakers see
da de sumne? It syntactically corresponds to the Basque ergative allignment:
[ERGATIVE] [ABSOLUTIVE] [verb]
That is, they would by tendency see
de (
sumne's x2) in the same way that they see an intransitive predicate's subject like the x1 of
blabi;
da blabi syntactically corresponds in Basque to
[ABSOLUTIVE] [verb]And it's the same for predicates the x1 of which appears in the English version of the gimste as nominative and the x2 as accusative, such as
viska:
x1 sees/views/perceives visually x2 under conditions x3
For Basque speakers, this x2 would naturally appear as absolutive and they would treat it in the same way as they would treat an intransitive predicate's x1 and describe it as such if they ever make a Lojban-Basque dictionary. Wikipedia has a Basque example of
The man saw the boy. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language#Morphological_ergativity):
Gizonak mutila ikusi du.
[gizon-ak] [mutil-a] [ikusi du]
[man-ERG] [boy-ABS] [saw]
, which naturally corresponds to
[lo nanmu] [lo nanla] [pu viska]Unlike Esperanto, Lojban does not morphologically (and syntactically, for that matter) mark cases, so the interpretation is usefully up to the listener/reader.
> and for transitive predicates the x1-case is the one that
> usually corresponds to the agent, just like the subject case in
> nominative-accusative.
Whether or not a transitive predicate's x1 is the agent does not at least in the above examples affect Basque speakers' interpretation of the x2-case;
gizonak is the agent, but it's of ergative case, and
mutila of absolutive case. And there is nothing which would prohibit them from interpreting
lo nanmu lo nanla pu viska in the same native scheme of theirs. Even if
lo nanmu is explicitly marked as the agent with
gau, they would associate it with their native eargative marker
-ak, while native Japanese speakers would associate it with their nominative marker
-ga.
For one thing, Lojban has certain characteristics of fluid-S, a subtype of active-stative. Wikipedia defines fluid-S (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_stative) as:
[...] the marking of the intransitive argument is decided by the speaker based
on semantic considerations. That is, for any given intransitive verb the speaker may choose whether to mark
the subject as agentive or patientive, with agentive marking implying a
degree of volition or control, and patientive
implying lack of volition or control, suffering, or sympathy on the part
of the speaker.
Consider single-argument intransitive predicates like
sipna. In
da sipna,
da, unmarked, is either agentive or patientive: when
da ri'a sipna, it's patientive; when
da segau sipna, it's agentive.
It's the same for multiple-argument intransitive predicates like
sakli. In
da sakli de,
da, unmarked, is again either agentive or patientive: when
da ri'a sakli de, it's patientive; when
da segau sakli de, it's agentive.
Also,
tu'a and
jai can make the intransitive argument either the agent or the object of a transitive verb -- the arbitrary marking of which is what is commonly defined as the main feature of active-stative.